THE AMERICAN vote against Israel in the Security Council Friday was, in a sense, the essential Carter. There was no good reason of state for the United States to reverse its previous refusal (twice to condemn Israel for expelling two West Bank mayors — not least because a change would mark its previous votes as politically motivated. Moreover, the issue of the mayors, who are indeed their people’s authentic representatives but are also spokesmen for violence, is more complicated than any U.N. majority — and certainly Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, who immediately offered the mayors the comforts of the house for a hunger strike — could be expected to grasp. Yet the administration condemned Israel. It evidently did so out of a familiar impulse to be at one with the virtuous souls of the Third World, notwithstanding the complexities of the larger issue at hand.

So in the time of Carter, Israel acted in its own best interest to protect its citizens against the continual violence of the Palestinians. Carter, like Obama today, backed the enemies of Israel.

The article goes on to highlight the consistencies between Carter and Obama:

That issue is whether friends should be treated differently from enemies. It’s a tough one. That is, it’s a tough one for the United States and especially for the Carter administration. No other country — no other president — has so indulged the luxury of deciding whether to support friends on all occasions regardless of their failings or whether to apply ostensibly universal values and condemn them in particular cases when they are deemed to fall short. It would be truly regrettable if the United States followed the pack and decided every case on political grounds alone. At the same time, it cannot be denied that there is a pack and that it hounds Israel shamelessly and that this makes it very serious when the United States joins it. Jimmy Carter has regularly anguished on this score. This time, in perhaps his last U.N. act of consequence, there was a suggestion in the air that he was finally doing what in his heart he has always wanted to do: vote for what he regarded as virtue.

Perhaps the most poignant sentence in the article had to do with Reagan.

To whatever effect, Ronald Reagan will do it differently.

America and Israel find themselves in a similar situation. Except instead of Reagan, the president is now Trump. I expect Israel will find out soon enough that America returns to being an ally.

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